Digital Aesthetics and Affective Politics: Isaac Julien’s Audiovisual Installations

Abstract

In the 1999 essay ‘Postcolonial Media Theory’ María Fernández stresses that there are some artists, such as Roshini Kempadoo and Keith Piper among others, who have raised postcolonial questions in the field of electronic media. However, since they work with digital photography and video, ‘their work is under-represented in established electronic media contexts’ (Fernández, 1999: 69). Most of the artworks created by them bring to the fore the issues of the construction of European master discourses, in relation to resistance, identity, representation, agency, memory, gender, and the legacy of colonialism in the form of migration. Stuart Hall, in his 1996 essay ‘When Was the “Post-colonial?” Thinking at the Limit’, highlights that the term ‘post-colonial’ re-elaborates colonization, defined as ‘part of an essentially transnational and transcultural global process’ (Hall, 1996: 247). If we mean the postcolonial not as a temporal succession, but rather as a political horizon that deconstructs Western hegemony and reveals the violence that is at its core, we realize that this task is far from over, as Achille Mbembe has recently claimed (2010).